What Was Thrown into the Sacred Cenote

The cenote does not give back what it receives.

This is the point. The Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá — sixty meters wide, its limestone walls dropping vertically to the water surface twenty meters below — is a one-way communication device. You speak into it. You do not expect a conversational response. What you expect is that Chaac, receiving your message through the medium of the water, will respond in a different register: through rain, through the state of the growing corn, through the body of a person thrown in who surfaces at noon with a message.

The cenote accepted everything for centuries.

Edward Thompson, the American consul and amateur archaeologist who owned the land around Chichén Itzá at the turn of the twentieth century, had the cenote dredged between 1904 and 1908. Using a dredge he imported from the United States and later diving himself, he removed tons of mud from the cenote’s bottom and sifted through it. The objects he found he sent to the Peabody Museum at Harvard, which is where most of them are now — a source of ongoing dispute between Mexico and the museum over cultural patrimony.

What he found was extraordinary.

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Jade was most common.

Thousands of jade objects: beads, pendants, mosaic plaques, figurines, masks, ear ornaments. Jade in the Maya world is the color of rain, the color of corn in growth, the color of the ocean horizon, the color of the most alive thing you can imagine. It is the most sacred material. To throw jade into the cenote was to send the most valuable thing to the most important recipient.

Gold came next. Not in the quantity that Thompson hoped for — his dredging was partly motivated by tales of golden treasure — but significantly: gold discs, embossed with mythological scenes, some showing ball game imagery, some showing rain god imagery, some showing figures that appear to be sacrificial victims. The gold came from as far away as Panama and Colombia, indicating that Chichén Itzá was the receiving end of a trade network that extended the entire length of Central America.

Rubber balls were found. Copal. Carved pyrite mirrors. Copper bells. Carved bone. Textiles, partially preserved by the anaerobic conditions at the bottom. Objects from Central Mexico, from the Guatemalan highlands, from coastal sites — the cenote’s contents are a map of the connections that ran through Chichén Itzá at its peak in the Postclassic period.

Human remains: the bones of adults and children, recovered from the bottom, some showing perimortem trauma consistent with sacrifice, some showing no such marks, which has complicated the scholarly picture considerably.

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The theology of the cenote is the theology of the best gift you have.

Diego de Landa, who described the cenote offerings in his mid-sixteenth-century account, said that the people believed the cenote led to another country and that the lords it contained were immensely wealthy — a characteristically Spanish-colonial framing of what is a more complex idea. The cenote does not lead to a country of wealthy lords. It leads to the underground water system, to the horizontal underworld that underlies the Yucatán, to the source of the rain that falls from above.

You are giving gifts to the rain. The rain does not want material objects. The rain wants to know that you understand the value of what you have received — that when it gives you water and corn and life, you understand what those things cost and what they are worth, and that you are willing to demonstrate your understanding by giving back something of equivalent value.

Jade is equivalent to rain. A life is equivalent to the rain’s gift of life.

The cenote received it all.

The mud at the bottom preserved it all.

In the Harvard museum cases, the jade and gold are still there, labeled and lit, separated from the limestone edge and the green water by a century and an ocean but still belonging, in the logic of Maya theology, to Chaac — received, accepted, somewhere in the counting of what was given and what must be returned.